The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

AFTER THE FIRST Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested, on August 29, 1949, a succession of events quickly unfolded that led the world to the brink of nuclear war. According to Gavril Korotkov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, Kim Il-Sung secretly visited Moscow in February 1950 to inform Stalin that North Korea was not yet ready to launch an invasion of the South. Stalin’s response to the North Korean dictator was straightforward: “They were ready to start the fighting and couldn’t wait.” Kim Il-Sung was then sent out of Stalin’s Kremlin office to “think it over.” Four months later, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean armies, supplied with Soviet arms and air support, launched their invasion.24 Over the course of the next three years, the Korean War took the lives of approximately two and a half million soldiers and civilians, including more than thirty-six thousand American servicemen and -women, with approximately eight thousand listed as missing in action or unaccounted for.25 During the conflict, Americans fought Russians directly in combat for the first time since the Russian Civil War in 1919. Although neither side could admit this fact openly, the American pilots recognized the faces of Russian pilots wearing Chinese uniforms, flying MiG fighter planes in the skies over Korea. In the heat of combat, the instruction to issue commands only in Chinese was quickly forgotten, as Russian swearing could be clearly heard over the airwaves.26